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Tuesday, 12 February 2013

So, you might've seen that the official Raspbmc release is out. Up until now I've been using Raspbmc RC5 (release candidate 5). Following a lot of hard work the guys over as Raspbmc have reached a point where they have a stable, feature-rich version based on XMBC 12. And so they've released Raspbmc v1.0.

Tuesday, 5 February 2013

So – I’ve had a week or two to play around with Raspbmc and thought I’d give some feedback. Overall impression? Damn good! I’m trying hard to not sound over-zealous about it, but I’m very happy with what I’ve seen so far. I’ve got my all my media loaded, I can control it with my TV remote & Android phone, it’s stable and slick.

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

OK – so here we are. I have my Pi. I have a working wireless connection. What should I do? Well, the answer to that has been screaming in the back of my mind ever since I heard about this brilliant bit of kit. That’s right – it’s Media Centre time!

So, I’ve started with Raspbmc. I can honestly say that I’m VERY impressed. The majority of stuff just works. And works well. My Pi’s been running for about 24 hours now, idling at about 15% CPU. I can switch over at any time, it responds immediately, lets me control it using my Android phone – hell, it even lets me use my SAMSUNG TV REMOTE to control it. And at the risk of repeating myself – it all just works.

This is what it looks like:

And this is how I did it.NOTE: YOU'LL SEE THAT THE ABOVE LINK WILL TAKE YOU TO WWW.MYRASPBERRYPIEXPERIENCE.COM. I'M MOVING TO A DEDICATED DOMAIN - YOU'LL BE ABLE TO FIND ALL PREVIOUS CONTENT THERE, ALONG WITH NEW POSTS.

Saturday, 19 January 2013

So I’ve been threatening to do this for quite some time now. I finally got wireless working on my Pi. This will hopefully unlock all sorts functionality, most noticeably a small, quiet local media centre, streaming media from a server.

As I did this on a spur of the moment decision, I went down to my local Maplin today and bought a wireless card from there. They sell a Pi bundle, so I decided to just go for the card they include in that. It’s sold as a “N150 Nano Wi-Di USB Dongle”, and is Maplin-branded. £9.99, and hopefully working out the box:http://www.maplin.co.uk/n150-nano-usb-wireless-adapter-681507

And this is what it looks like (excuse the poor photo – I’m sharing an SD card with my camera at the moment):

The good news? I plugged it in, booted it up, and everything just worked. It couldn’t possibly have been easier! For the few steps I DID take, have a look here. What next I hear you ask? How about you take a stab at getting Raspbmc up and running for a brilliant media centre - take a look here.

NOTE: YOU'LL SEE THAT THE ABOVE LINK WILL TAKE YOU TO WWW.MYRASPBERRYPIEXPERIENCE.COM. I'M MOVING TO A DEDICATED DOMAIN - YOU'LL BE ABLE TO FIND ALL PREVIOUS CONTENT THERE, ALONG WITH NEW POSTS.